Robert L. Moore > Quotes

“Whenever we are detached, unrelated, and withholding when what we know could help others, whenever we use our knowledge as a weapon to belittle and control others or to bolster our status or wealth at others’ expense, we are identified with the Shadow Magician as Manipulator. We are doing black magic, damaging ourselves as well as those who could benefit from our wisdom.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the great founding kings of that civilization, Sargon of Akkad, carved out a kingdom, built a civilization, and called himself “He Who Rules the Four Quarters.” In ancient thought, not only does the world radiate from a center, but it is geometrically organized into four quarters. It is a circle divided by a cross. The Egyptian pyramids—themselves images of the central Mound—were oriented toward the four compass points, toward “the four quarters.” Ancient maps were drawn schematically with this idea. And all of the ancient Mediterranean, as well as Chinese and other Asian civilizations, had the same view.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“This “sacred” space is something men who are guided by the Magician know well. These men may actually put themselves into that “space” deliberately, much like ritual magicians who draw their magic circles and recite their incantations. They enter this space by listening to certain musical pieces, by tending to a hobby, by taking long walks in the woods, by meditating on certain themes and mental pictures, and by many other methods. When they enter this sacred space within they can be in touch with the Magician; they can emerge from the inner space seeing what they need to do about a problem and knowing how to do it.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“In the present crisis in masculinity we do not need, as some feminists are saying, less masculine power. We need more. But we need more of the mature masculine.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“the Ego of the mature man needs to think of itself—no matter what status or power it has temporarily achieved—as the servant of a transpersonal Will, or Cause. It needs to think of itself as a steward of the King energy, not for the benefit of itself, but for the benefit of those within its “realm,” whatever that may be.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Here is a difference between the Warrior and the Hero. The man (or the boy) accessing the Hero, as we’ve said, does not know his limitations; he is romantic about his invulnerability. The warrior, however, through his clarity of thinking realistically assesses his capacities and his limitations in any given situation.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The only thing that can be slain, however, is an ego organization that has merged unconsciously with the great dragon. The great dragon cannot be killed. It must be related to in a conscious way (see Edinger 1999). No matter how old you are, you are not an adult until you have slain that unconscious identification with the grandiose presence within. That is what human initiation is all about. Initiation is death. There must be a ritual slaying of this particular monster. We love to tell everyone else to slay their monsters. Whatever my race is, I love to urge you to slay your race's monsters. Whatever my religion is, I love to tell you to slay your religion's monsters, but I don't necessarily want to slay mine. Whatever my gender is, I want the other gender to slay its monsters, even though I resist facing the monsters in mine. That is how it works.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“I, Claudius”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The High Chair Tyrant who attacks his human host is the perfectionist; he expects the impossible of himself and berates himself (just as his mother did) when he can’t meet the demands of the infant within. The Tyrant pressures a man for more and better performance and is never satisfied with what he produces. The unfortunate man becomes the slave (as the mother was) of the grandiose two-year-old inside of him.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“One of the hardest things to do as a counselor or therapist is to get clients to separate their Egos from their emotions without at the same time repressing the emotions.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The Magician energy is the archetype of awareness and of insight, primarily, but also of knowledge of anything that is not immediately apparent or commonsensical. It is the archetype that governs what is called in psychology “the observing Ego.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“In the present crisis of masculinity we do not need, as some feminists are saying, less masculine power. We need more. But we need more of the mature masculine. We need more Man psychology. We need to develop a sense of calmness about masculine power so we don’t have to act out dominating, disempowering behavior toward others.”
― Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette

“the psyche of the man who is adequately accessing the Warrior is organized around his central commitment. This commitment eliminates a great deal of human pettiness. Living in the light of lofty ideals and spiritual realities such as God, democracy, communism, freedom, or any other worthy transpersonal commitment, so alters the focus of a man’s life that petty squabbling and personal Ego concerns no longer matter much.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“narcissistic personality disorder. These people really feel that they are the center of the universe (although they aren’t centered themselves) and that others exist to serve them. Instead of mirroring others, they insatiably seek mirroring from them. Instead of seeing others, they seek to be seen by them.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“genuine psychics also live in a world of sensations and "vibrations", of deeply felt intuitions. Their conscious awareness, like that of the artist, is extraordinarily open to invasion from other people's thoughts and feelings and from the murky realm of the collective unconscious. They seem to move in a world behind or beneath the world of daylight common sense. From this hidden world they receive, often in the form of almost audible words, gusts of strong feelings, unaccounted-for smells, sensations of heat and cold not accessible to others, images of great horror and beauty, and clues about what is really going on with people.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

“Blessing is a psychological, or spiritual, event. The good king always mirrored and affirmed others who deserved it. He did this by seeing them—in a literal sense, in his audiences at the palace, and in the psychological sense of noticing them, knowing them, in their true worth.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Our egos are the the chair of the board. And the board members are the archetypes within us. Each needs to be heard from. Each needs to stand on its own and provide its input. But the whole person under the supervision of the Ego needs to make the final decision in our lives.”
― Robert L. Moore

“The Magician archetype in a man is his “bullshit detector”; it sees through denial and exercises discernment. He sees evil for what and where it is when it masquerades as goodness, as it so often does.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“the world presents itself as tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. Caught in the foreground, he can’t see the underlying background. Caught in the “myriads of forms,” as the Hindus say, he can’t find the Oneness that would bring him calm and stability. Living on the finite side of the prism, he can only experience light in its dazzling but fractured rainbow hues.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you honestly that without a spiritual practice it will be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to deal effectively with your archetypal Self, its grandiose energies, and its unconscious projections. If you come into analysis with me without a spiritual life, you might project your god-complex onto me if you like me and idealize me. I will probably try to carry it, and we will be tempted to have one of those Woody Allen, twenty-year analyses. This is what happens with Freudians and other therapists who do not understand that an idealizing transference of the god-complex onto the therapist is a mythic and spiritual phenomenon. If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion. The therapist has become a little Holy Father with his own little pseudo-religion.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“When, however, the Warrior is operating on his own, unrelated to these other archetypes, the results for the mortal man accessing even the positive Warrior (the Warrior in his fullness) can be disastrous. As we have said, the Warrior in his pure form is emotionally detached; his transpersonal loyalty radically relativizes the importance of a man’s human relationships.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“That he has an unconquerable spirit, that he has great courage, that he is fearless, that he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline. Discipline means that he has the rigor to develop control and mastery over his mind and over his body, and that he has the capacity to withstand pain, both psychological and physical. He is willing to suffer to achieve what he wants to achieve.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

“What you will see, unless you know what to look for, is rage. But under the rage is a sense of worthlessness, of vulnerability and weakness, for behind the Tyrant lies the other pole of the King’s bipolar shadow system, the Weakling. If he can’t be identified with the King energy, he feels he is nothing.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“This is what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr talked about as “the sin of sensuality.” And it’s what the Hindus talk about as maya—the dance of illusion, the intoxicating (addictive) dance of sensuous things that enchants and enthralls the mind, catching us up in the cycles of pleasure and pain.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The gods always bring down those mortals who get too arrogant, demanding, or inflated”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

“The King cares for the whole realm and is the steward of nature as well as of human society.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The power of the unconscious energies is so great that if they are not controlled, contained, and channeled, if they are not accessed at just the right moment and in just the right dose, they may blow the Ego structure to bits. Too much power without the proper “transformers” and the right amount of “insulation” to contain it will overload the analysand’s circuits and destroy him. The revelation of secret information must be measured out, because there are reasons for its having been hidden from the Ego in the first place.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The growing complexity of law and the coded language of legal proceedings and documents—whatever else they may be intended for—clearly proclaim to the general public, “We in the legal profession have access to hidden knowledge that can make or break you. And after we’ve charged you an outrageous fee for our services, you may, or may not, benefit from our magic.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Ancient peoples located the Center in many places: Mount Sinai, Jerusalem, Hierapolis, Olympus, Rome, Tenochtitlán. But it was always the Center of a quadrated universe, an orderly, geometrical universe. The Center of that universe was always where the king—god and man—reigned, and was the locus of divine revelation, of divine organizing and creative power.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects